Diary: (2) Michael Robbins on Proust and the Grateful Dead
Read Part One of this post here
I streamed a few more ’72 shows on the Archive, then followed some unhinged comment threads to ’73 and ’74, where I discovered “Row Jimmy,” which has become the Dead song I play the most. It’s a sweet song. Jerry Garcia plays and sings—“You ain’t got half of what you thought you had”—with a yearning sweetness that remains my version of what Proust’s narrator hears as he listens to a sonata, “an appeal to a joy not of this earth.” It will sound ridiculous, but I want to say the song, at least on the right nights, is angelic. I sought out all the versions I could find. And thus I landed in May 1977, like so many others before me. The “Row Jimmy” played on May 28, 1977, at Hartford Civic Center (commercially available on To Terrapin: Hartford ’77) is the one—at least as far as I’m concerned—but that I was concerned is the point. I was on the bus.
I keep coming back to May, though it’s a cliché. It’s become fashionable to proclaim Barton Hall overrated, often in favor of the next night’s show in Buffalo. It’s possible. May 9th’s “Help on the Way”>“Slipknot!”>“Franklin’s Tower” is probably unequaled (the arrows indicating segues are artifacts from the tape-trading days), and the version of “Comes a Time” includes what is perhaps Jerry Garcia’s most beautiful solo. Except that Jerry played his most beautiful solo the night before at Cornell, on “Morning Dew.” Then there’s Boston Garden on the 7th, with Garcia on “Mississippi Half-Step” playing like he knows he’ll be killed when he stops, if you’ll forgive some rock-crit hyperbole of my own. (All three shows, plus one from the 5th in New Haven, are collected on Get Shown the Light: May 1977, an eleven-CD box I finally splurged for last year when the Kansas Jayhawks basketball team won the national championship.) It doesn’t matter. Any night in May is the best night. By ’77 the Dead had coalesced into a single telepathic animal, and in the month of May the promise of an oft-quoted lyric was fulfilled: “The music played the band.”
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In May 1977 my dad took me to see Star Wars in Wichita (where Jack Straw is from), perhaps at the same time the Dead were onstage in Hartford. Proust writes that the sonata’s phrases “seemed most eloquently to characterize … those impressions which at remote intervals I experienced in my life as landmarks, points of departure for the construction of a true life”—impressions, in his case, of a country steeple or a line of trees. For me, a young farmer and his droids in a desolate landscape first gave me an intimation of those flashes in the dark that art would provide. You get shown the light in the strangest of places. The Grateful Dead haunt me because they characterize my landmarks and points of departure. It’s not that Proust knew the sonata when he glimpsed the steeple, but that, in what he doesn’t hesitate to call his soul, the sonata speaks to him of that steeple, which is to say, of the past, of time itself. The Dead’s music—for me, anyway—is about time. “Row Jimmy” doesn’t remind me of seeing Star Wars thematically or because I heard it then.
All Proust and the Dead and Star Wars have in common externally is a propensity for going on too long. The connections they draw in me are personal, contingent, a matter of psychology. More than anything I want to go back to May 1977 and watch a movie with my dad. Proust’s narrator, thinking of the peal of a bell he heard as a child, feels that “that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself.” But the Dead say there’s nothing you can hold for very long.
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.
Editor’s note:
There are several new editions of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in English. The long-standard 1922–1930 versions of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, which were revised in 1981 by Terence Kilmartin and again by D.J. Enright in 1996, are being issued in an updated and annotated edition by William C. Carter, whose fifth volume, including both The Captive and The Fugitive (Proust’s volumes five and six), appeared in February from Yale University Press. Penguin Classics brought out in January in paperback the seventh and last volume in its series of newer translations by various hands: Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. New York Review Books is issuing in May the first volume, Swann’s Way, in a 1982 translation by James Grieve, whose translation of the second volume appears in the Penguin series.
And stay tuned for Book Post’s Middlemarch read-along with Mona Simpson, coming soon. Her new novel, Commitment is published this month. Sign up for free Book Post updates for more info.
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